We started the day with a brainstorming session on how the system for reserving plants could be improved. There have been a couple of near misses recently, with customers arriving to collect plants that were supposed to be reserved for them and didn't seem to be, or had at one time been reserved but were no longer there. The four of us were unanimous in how the system could be made better while being perfectly easy to use. Abolish the practice of ringing people and saying that plants are available without physically putting one aside. Label and date all reserved plants and write down their location in the reserved book. Tell all customers they have a month maximum to collect their plants. If any customer has wangled permission to delay collection for more than that then flag it on the label and in the book so that the plant doesn't get put back out for sale by somebody tidying up the reserve bed. I don't mind clear procedures myself for that sort of thing, as long as they are straightforward. They save so much time and embarassment versus faffing around searching for lost plants while the customer (who has always driven from Norfolk or Herfordshire, not just up the road) waits. Besides, years of working in financial services have inured me to procedures. The penalty for not following them in my previous career was not just a modicum of social pain for me and a customer potentially lost for the business, but fines from the regulator running into hundreds of thousands, and losses unscrambling trades running into millions. It concentrated the mind wonderfully, and I got very good at procedures. Whether a couple of my colleagues can be persuaded to follow them is another question. I'm not optimistic.
Apart from that it was a very good day for social connectivity. A lot of regular customers came in. There was the couple with two charming terriers, slightly smaller than airdales. Unfortunately I have asked them once already what sort of dog they are, and have forgotten the answer, so feel rude asking again. Also a perpetually cheerful mother and daughter who often shop with us, and a man who turned out to be the brother of my beekeeping tutor, and the editor of a gardening magazine. I once tried to persuade her to let me write a beekeeping column for it, but she said that while she loved the idea her publishers wouldn't let her stray that far from the magazine's core subject of fruit and vegetables. She did persuade me to write her a couple of Q&As, which turned out to be a doddle as I could write the Q as well as the A, but then it turned out that this was an unpaid slot, as her experts did it 'for the publicity'. The publicity has not yet been of any tangible benefit to me, but something might come of it one day.
The takings for the weekend were quite respectable. Now that we've had a bit of rain it will be interesting to see if things pick up at all. It is difficult trying to guess how much of the quiet patch is down to the weak consumer climate and moribund housing market, versus to what extent it is weather-driven. We had several customers today who said it was their first visit, some who had found us while looking for a particular plant in the RHS plant finder, and others who had driven past many times and finally decided to turn off into our car park today for some reason. We need to work out how to persuade some more local people to do that.
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